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My usual beat for The New Yorker is political and legal commentary, and so I’ll ask, in advance of listing my favorite recent mystery novels, for the forbearance of the genre’s true specialists. I’m not the person who can say, for example, which of Louise Penny’s twenty “Chief Inspector Gamache” novels is the best. (“Still Life,” a friend tells me.) But there are overlaps in expertise: most of the best mysteries deal with the imperfect fit between the law and justice and with, as in politics, skewed balances of power, if only in the home, and the tension between public and private identities. I love the puzzles these kinds of books present. Here are four greats from the past twenty years, plus a bonus.

“The Trespasser,” by Tana French

French has written ten novels (the “Dublin Murder Squad” sextet, the “Cal Hooper” trilogy, and one stand-alone), and the real debate is what order of greatness to put them in. Nine of them were chosen by readers for a recent Times list of the “Best Thrillers of the Century,” the most by any writer. “The Trespasser” is the only one that didn’t make that list. I stand by my pick. The book, about a young Irish woman murdered in her hard-won home, is the French novel that most often comes back to me unbidden. I’ve sometimes taken it off the shelf just to reread the final interrogation scene.

“When Will There Be Good News?” by Kate Atkinson

As with French, there is a lot of good Atkinson in the mystery (and non-mystery) department. “When Will There Be Good News?” is the third in her “Jackson Brodie” series, and an exemplar of her narrative control over chaos. Set mostly in Scotland, the book involves the disappearance of a woman and her baby in the long wake of a family murder. Reggie Chase, a babysitter who pulls Brodie into the case, returns as a detective herself in later Atkinson novels.

“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” by Stieg Larsson

Its rich afterlife alone might earn this novel a place on the list: much imitated (and parodied); an accelerant in the rise of Nordic Noir; the template for a certain kind of hacker-detective; the basis for two sequels and two movies. And yet, upon first reading, I was ambivalent—put off in part because of all the hype but also, perhaps, because of what the book seemed to present as the available responses to sexual trauma. When I picked it up again this summer, though, I found it more nuanced, engaging, and multilayered than I had remembered.

“Wild Dark Shore,” by Charlotte McConaghy

This one is a bit of a wild card, a crossover into the climate-fiction genre. The setting is a scientific station on an Antarctic island that must be evacuated because of rapidly rising sea levels—a locked-seed-bank mystery, one might say. A shipwrecked woman confronts the enigma of a missing researcher, an unexplained grave, beached whales, and the question of what can or should be saved. It is, in many ways, a counterweight to “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” offering a very different vision of resilience.

And the bonus: “Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s & 50s.” The novels in this boxed set (including Vera Caspary’s “Laura,” Dorothy B. Hughes’s “In a Lonely Place,” and Patricia Highsmith’s “The Blunderer”) are outside this list’s time frame, but the grouping (edited, with notes, by Sarah Weinman) is new. Mid-century America could be an awfully unsettling place.

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• “The Mosquito Bowl,” starring Nicholas Galitzine, Bill Skarsgård, Ray Nicholson, and Tom Francis, is in theatres this weekend. Based on Buzz Bissinger’s book of the same name, it’s about a football game that took place during the Second World War, between the 4th and the 29th Marine Regiments.

• Set in Ireland in the nineteen-eighties and tracing the complicated connection between a pair of teen-age friends, “Stations,” by Louise Kennedy, which comes out on November 3rd, has made its way onto many lists of anticipated works.

• Gary Shteyngart’s first collection of personal essays will be published on the 17th, and the title says it all: “The Sensualist: Adventures in Pure Pleasure.”

P.S. Min Jin Lee recommends “Jane Eyre,” by Charlotte Brontë, because, she says, “the capacity to know a character so intimately of this era is really unusual, and so beautiful.”

“Every character should want something,” goes an overused adage of fiction-writing workshops, popularized by Kurt Vonnegut. (“Even if it is only a glass of water,” he added.) Novels centered on gay male experiences have, historically, epitomized this maxim. There’s the want for sex, often lots of it; for youth, exemplified most famously by Thomas Mann’s 1912 novella, “Death in Venice”; and for acceptance from straight culture, especially in work birthed during the peak of the AIDS crisis, such as “Second Son” (1988), by Robert Ferro, in which a man with a deadly virus navigates his relationship with his close-knit family. Not to mention, a desire for glamour and for life’s finer things—travel abroad and summers in the country—that must be chased the way a collector would an unpaid credit-card bill. Edmund White’s 2016 gem, “Our Young Man,” opens with portrayals of a journalist and a bartender who scrape together their incomes in order to afford a house share on the Fire Island Pines in the early nineteen-eighties—a luxury, the book implies, that would be financially prohibitive in this millennium.

The first-person speakers of Nate Lippens’s Wisconsin Trilogy have checked out from want. They toil as bartenders and caterers; off the clock, they’re misanthropes with a few trusted confidants and a bevy of deceased acquaintances who occupy their thoughts. Across Lippens’s cycle of semi-autobiographical novels—“My Dead Book,” from 2021; “Ripcord,” from 2024; and “Bastards,” on shelves this fall—these unnamed narrators share biographical details, enough that they seem to be the same character. Each fled home and school at fifteen, learning from a ragtag, self-designed syllabus of twentieth-century literature, cult cinema, punk rock, and queer art. Each endured stretches of junkiedom and stints in mental facilities, and spent young manhood hustling and hanging out with other sex workers, surviving the most disastrous period of the AIDS epidemic in the United States by becoming precociously steadfast. The narrator of “My Dead Book” recalls, about “social workers, outreach volunteers, and youth counselors” from the era, “They trained us to be vigilant. No exceptions. They saved our lives and they taught us not to trust anyone.” No surprise that he’s held on to his obstinance, as he admits elsewhere: “Negativity is my strength. I’m a man of my word and that word is usually no.”

The aging autodidacts of “Ripcord” and “Bastards” live alone in the Milwaukee area (“My Dead Book” depicts a prior spell in nearby Madison). They pass their free time watching movies, reading, remembering long talks with dead friends, chatting for hours with living ones, and wringing their hands over their chronic insomnia. They lodge their complaints in fragmented prose that splits the difference between comic zingers and poison bonbons. “Some people get the glory. Some people get the glory hole,” “Ripcord” begins. They are resigned to circumstance, their ennui wizened rather than fashionable. In “Bastards,” Lippens’s hero recounts the evening when he stopped trying:

I should make more money. That was the problem. I wasn’t succeeding. My hard work would pay off. And despite changes in names, cities, attitudes, cigarette brands, and drugs, the misbegotten notion of reward and advancement and achievement ruled until the night at the mirror. I burned my life to the ground. Job, apartment, friends, the whole goddamned thing. Afterward, clean and in shock, I saw the face in the mirror again, and I knew I wasn’t going to be a phoenix risen from my own destruction. I was going to lie in my ashes and call it done.

And he does, dispensing with professional and social ambition in a way that feels realistic. After all, most of us, queer or otherwise, make our lives in the rubble of earlier dreams of success, mobility, and, yes, liberation. Aspiring artists submit to the practical necessities of paying off debt. Vacation plans get drowned in work duties. Free spirits become shackled spouses. Lippens forges poetry from disappointment, inhabiting this mood until it becomes familiar, even a source of connection. Curmudgeons, he knows, are relatable, their lives marked by the certainty that no fantasy will ever spring them from the drudgery of survival. His survivors find dignity in the grit, a hard-fought self-love. What looks like acquiescence might actually be resilience.

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“My Dead Book,” Lippens’s début novel and the first volume in the triptych, originally came out as a print-on-demand edition from the niche yet mighty press Publication Studio, in its Fellow Travelers series, an imprint dedicated to publishing overlooked writing, much of which deals in queer themes. Since then, the book, which Semiotext(e) reissued in 2024, has developed a word-of-mouth following, owing both to its coruscating prose and its frank view of twenty-first-century L.G.B.T.Q. life in the United States. The tremendous political gains that queer people made during the past two decades have given rise to a false sense of equality, concealing both the scars of history and the fresher wounds inflicted by more novel forms of homophobia. Simultaneously, as many have bemoaned in recent years, America has become too damn expensive.

Lippens’s narrators are products of this status quo. Without a college or high-school degree, their job prospects are limited. The narrator of “Ripcord” cannot pass a credit check. The narrator of “Bastards” does not have a bank account. They hook up but have given up on relationships. When a friend tries to set him up on a date, the narrator of “Ripcord,” who cannot even care for a cactus, declines: “I say I’m retired.” Blurry, half-remembered calamities have forced them to start over from nothing, again and again. The inertia of their lives weighs on them. Now, as the narrator of “My Dead Book” quips, “The only person who would say I’m young is someone else my age.”

Lippens’s début has a more straightforward—less shattered—structure than its sequels, focussing on salad days spent turning tricks and taking drugs. Its tone is elegiac, unsurprising considering that first novels so often explore the accrued pain of the writer’s life to date; still, for Lippens, that date was later than for most authors. “My Dead Book,” published when he was fifty, sports an uncommon polish and perspective for an inaugural effort. As the narrator grieves friends he lost to disease, drugs, and suicide, the book bypasses the bildungsroman to investigate more uncharted territory: the making of a crank. Childhood, he tells us, was a litany of obstacles that had to be overcome, a stretch that was “sad and confusing, and those feelings only grew with time.” The novel’s bleak, lucid tone fit the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, which was raging when the book first arrived. “Online I’ve seen friends lament their shut-in status and cabin fever, making jokes about The Shining,” its narrator reflects, comparing the isolation of an Upper Midwest winter to his own penchant for solitude. “I’m not about to tell anyone that often days, sometimes weeks, pass without me going outside.”

“Ripcord” is an arch, complex successor and in many respects a more impressive accomplishment—partly because it departs from its predecessor’s most evident influence, Gus Van Sant’s 1991 film, “My Own Private Idaho.” This Shakespearean tragedy of sex work courses through “My Dead Book” and Lippens’s plaintive evocations of the camaradarie and cavorting of hustlers in the eighties and nineties. “Ripcord” keeps us for the most part in a contemporary moment, a difficult shift that Lippens manages nimbly. He amps up the language, building an environment from his narrator’s shtick, a prosodic jungle gym of jokes, derision, self-deprecation, and asides about old Hollywood starlets, experimental writers, and outré musicians. Instead of burying bourgeois culture beneath the protagonist’s punky youth, “Ripcord” contends with it. All the narrator’s capacity for deflection comes into play as he deals with the humdrum present, the reality that nothing will change—certainly not himself.

Lippens picks the right subject to explore this midlife immovability: sex. For his narrator, promiscuity is a respite and a diversion, never a tool to open possibilities for the future, not even when he gets close to someone who makes him briefly engage in “romantic delusions.” This lover, Dustin, is younger and married. He misses the narrator’s conversational reference to the actor Angie Dickinson and dislikes one of his favorite novels because it lacks “redemption.” Yet they have a dynamic that tempts the narrator to lower his defenses, until Dustin breaks things off because his husband reads their texts.

The protagonist reacts to the fissure with a self-lacerating wit that can’t hide an underlying egotism. “I am a cliché. An older man having a nonaffair with a younger man. A lonely man in a lousy room saying tired words,” he disparages himself. His pride may be bruised, but, even during a vulnerable moment, it offers a kind of fortitude. Describing his abjection fuels his sense of superiority over others and his own circumstances. “They don’t understand when I say I’m a piece of shit, I mean they are pieces of shit too,” he says of acquaintances who fail to appreciate his self-effacing humor. “I’m using myself as the stool sample for humanity.”

Lippens’s punch lines are unstoppable, his narrators like a tawdry standup comedian going whole hog in an empty theatre. “Bastards” is a meditation on performance as the self-aware heart of the gay working class. The book begins with the narrator, who has recently emerged from a psychiatric hold, rhinestoning the dress of a drag-queen friend—named Grace Period—in the middle of the night. This, he informs us, is his own grace period from the various types of social performance that subsistence demands of him: “The hours between midnight and dawn are best because I don’t have to stay in character.”

To lose character means, among other things, to let his stiff upper lip loosen, to grow morose about ghosts. “Bastards” perseverates over one friend in particular, Rudy, an older gay man with an acidic outlook to match the narrator’s own. Recollections of Rudy reappear throughout, accompanied by a simultaneous thrill and annoyance with his rambling opinions—Rudy, too, could banter like there was always a camera on him. His prickliness molded the narrator, who was a teen-ager when they met. “Rudy was first chair in the mental peanut gallery of faces I pictured observing my life. I measured my actions in his imagined reactions. I saw the world in particular lights—Rudy-worthy details popped—so I could report back to him, a double agent.”

Both men “understood the obituarist’s tally and the gossip’s snark,” a useful dichotomy for Lippens’s trilogy. If “My Dead Book” is a collective eulogy and “Ripcord” a sardonic pillow book, “Bastards” merges these forms, spangling self-mockery across its surface as a survival mechanism and a means of fabricating delight.

Lippens’s characters bear an outspoken contempt for so many aspects of contemporary gay life—the drag-brunch fad, for instance, which the aforementioned Grace Period regards as inferior to the plucky drag scene of the eighties or nineties. Their disdain, though, is bespoke and self-protective, fanged yet functionally harmless. These are outsiders asserting the validity of a history that is always being forgotten.

In spite of their occasional snobbishness, they refuse America’s truly destructive snobberies—the supreme regard accorded to money and material success, coupledom (rather than singledom), owning property (instead of renting it)—and lay bare how these values can feel inescapable even within oppressed microcosms like the queer community. The trilogy rebuffs the primacy of coastal metropolises and prestigious jobs, the sort of hierarchies the narrator of “Bastards” scorns as “status fetishes.” Lippens denies the premium that gay-male culture places on youth and masculinity. After an encounter with a man who insults him for not being butch enough, the narrator of “Ripcord” goes back on the app where they met: “I changed my profile to: 5”7’ fem with the face of an embittered sea captain, the voice of a pissed off fey concierge, and a body like an unmade bed.” The narrator of “Bastards” rues to a pal at a catering gig, “Last few years my close friends have winnowed to other effeminate gay men our age.” He doesn’t resent his friends or the intimacy of his circle, but he begrudges the normativity that has all but forced him into a narrow milieu.

The issue, “Bastards” indicates, is one of class. The prejudices of a superficial society obsessed with social position nag at these books. Lippens is too much an aesthete, too slyly capable with surfaces, to ever use the term “classism.” His trilogy is a diagnosis dressed up in a rhinestone gown, shining brightly before a trick of the light reveals the rot underneath. ♦

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Meghan O’Rourke joins Kevin Young to read and discuss “Poem to My Litter,” by Max Ritvo, and her own poem “Sectioned.” O’Rourke is the author, most recently, of the New York Times best-seller “The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness,” a finalist for the National Book Award in Nonfiction. Her other books include the best-selling memoir “The Long Goodbye” and three poetry collections, including “Sun in Days,” named a Top Ten Poetry Book of 2017 by the New York Times. She has also edited two anthologies, “The Story of the Body: Poems of Illness & Recovery”—which was released earlier this month—and “A World Out of Reach: Dispatches from Life Under Lockdown.” She is a professor of creative writing at Yale University and the editor of The Yale Review. ♦

The writer and director Lance Hammer’s new feature, “Queen at Sea,” is both a worthy experience in itself and a sharp, if unintended, work of criticism in action: it’s the film that “Fjord” could and should have been. The latter movie, released earlier this month, considers a religious family living in Norway, who endure intrusive legal inquiries and interventions when teachers suspect the parents of inflicting corporal punishment on their children. “Queen at Sea” similarly confronts the intervention of government authority into private lives. It’s the story of an elderly woman in London, Leslie (played by Anna Calder-Marshall), who has dementia, and whose similarly aged husband, Martin (Tom Courtenay), is caught having sex with her by Leslie’s daughter, Amanda (Juliette Binoche). Certain that Leslie is unable to consent, Amanda demands that Martin promise never to have sex with her mother again. Martin refuses, so Leslie calls the police—only to scare him, she later admits, but by then it’s too late. Her call instantly sets a criminal investigation into motion, Martin is arrested, and the household becomes the subject of scrutiny by police and social workers.

Unlike in “Fjord,” which never shows the corporal punishment, however mild, that even the parents avow, “Queen at Sea” explicitly, mere minutes into the movie, shows the sex act as Amanda witnesses it. Hammer honorably and with sincere curiosity puts the family’s own experiences and principles, their ethics and their knowledge, to the test in the face of the power of law. Two officers arrive, and they follow procedure: they seal off the couple’s bedroom as a crime scene and report the case to their superiors, who order technicians in hazmat suits to collect the pair’s bedding and dispatch a sex-crime investigator who insists that Leslie be brought in for a medical examination. For Leslie, who is only vaguely aware of her surroundings, the intimately intrusive procedures are an unbearable ordeal.

Martin, for his part, rejects the premise of Amanda’s outrage: he contends that Leslie, though severely impaired, is nonetheless aware of his identity and presence and, indeed, initiates sex with him. Leslie’s impairment is, in fact, variable; at times, she speaks, tersely but sensibly, and her actions often clearly express reasonable preferences. The elderly couple’s relationship is tight and tender. Leslie has a regular set of daily activities with Martin and hews closely to them (for instance, leading him on their daily walk). When the authorities insist they be kept apart at home, she persistently and unambiguously returns to him.

There’s nothing manospherical or ideological about Martin’s insistence on maintaining sexual relations with Leslie. He’s neither ignorant nor dismissive of the notion of consent; rather, by the nature of his privileged relationship to her, he sincerely and respectfully believes that she has consented. What’s more, the movie puts evidence of this onscreen, although Amanda argues that Leslie is merely reverting to pre-rational and primal instinct. Martin may appear self-serving, but he is also intensely and finely attuned to Leslie and to the gestures and facial expressions by which she communicates. He refuses to rule Leslie outside the pale of connection and consciousness. His belief in her consent and even desire is inseparable from his unwillingness to let go of her and of the mutual bond of their shared life.

Hammer catches decisive moments with understated but telling precision, thanks to the cast’s deeply committed and finely tuned performances (especially Calder-Marshall’s astoundingly infinitesimal transformations and Courtenay’s carefully calibrated fury). During the initial police visit, one of the officers admits to his colleague that he has no idea what to do. (They proceed to do what they’re trained to do: call in the complaint and set the mighty and implacable machine into motion.) After the couple’s sheets and blanket have been confiscated as evidence, Leslie insists on returning to her bed and lies down on the bare mattress. A risk assessor examining the house ruefully considers the height of the stairs, although Leslie, who has lived there for ages, apparently manages them fine, many times a day. Such details capture how bureaucratic power—its inflexible procedures and constraints—have changed the fundamental order of things. Hammer moves stepwise through the drama, sticking to its beats and not delving into its interstices. His cinematic gaze at the couple is fine, patient, and nuanced, though it doesn’t reach the obsessive intimacy and scorched-earth terror of Gaspar Noé’s 2022 film “Vortex”.

The result is a movie that, rather than digging beneath the surface of its machinelike relentlessness, adorns it with literary conceits, above all, its ongoing parallels of three generations of women: Leslie, who has a deeply devoted husband; Amanda, who’s separated from her husband; and Amanda’s daughter, Sarah (Florence Hunt), a teen-ager exploring first love with a classmate named James (Cody Molko). Amanda and Sarah live in Newcastle, where Amanda is a tenured professor; they’re just in London for a year on Amanda’s sabbatical, staying in a barely furnished apartment. Such incidentals get in the way of several more fundamental and analytical details. Instead of the sweet sentimentality of Sarah’s romance, the story practically calls out for its details to be refracted through her sensibility, and that of her generation, in conversation with James and her other friends. (A well-crafted but brief scene in which she broaches the matter with her mother only hints at her unexplored bewilderment.) Moreover, it’s inconceivable that, having been arrested and possibly facing charges, Martin wouldn’t consult a lawyer, yet no lawyer is involved. Furthermore, in a film where the legalities of consent are central, a lawyer’s presence would not only clarify Martin’s risks and possible strategies but also look more broadly at the drama’s emotional, intellectual, and political ramifications. (Plus, a pet peeve: in a pair of scenes, Amanda writes, but what is she writing?)

Still, Hammer shrewdly directs his attention throughout to the inner ravages and outer indignities wrought by Leslie’s affliction, including with the horrifying banality of one possible imposed solution: removal to a care facility and the enforced separation from her husband that this would entail. Where “Fjord” is full of leering political nudges, manipulative sentimentality, and tacit denunciations under the guise of ostensible objectivity, “Queen at Sea” is, at its core, a tragedy. It depicts not a conflict between right and wrong but between two apparent rights—two truths and two forms of justice that are irreconcilable, incompatible, contradictory, and mutually exclusive. For all the film’s distractions, omissions, and short-circuits, Hammer displays a keen eye for devastating ironies, for clearly and plainly imagined events that don’t merely turn the tables but overturn them. The modest candor of his approach is all the more noteworthy for the far-reaching and unsparing world view that it invokes. ♦

“I’m about to get pulled over,” Kendall Scudder, the new chairman of the Texas Democratic Party, said one morning in September, as he raced north on Highway 87 at ninety miles an hour. In his rearview mirror, he saw a Texas Highway Patrol S.U.V. flash its lights. A young officer in a khaki uniform and a cowboy hat approached Scudder, who typically drives a pickup truck but had folded all six feet three of himself into a rental Nissan Altima. “I shouldn’t have been doing that,” Scudder muttered under his breath.

The patrolman, whose nametag read “HAINES,” told Scudder that he’d committed two infractions: first, he’d been speeding, and, second, he’d been cruising in the left lane. Haines studied Scudder’s license and glanced at the rental agreement on the chairman’s phone. Then he fixed his attention on a gold pin attached to Scudder’s plaid navy blazer: a red-eyed donkey in a fighting stance, wearing boxing gloves. “What does that little pendant on your lapel mean?” he asked.

“Oh, you know,” the chairman began, hesitantly. “I always got my little brooch things. My mama always gave me a bunch of those.” Scudder, who collects Democratic Party memorabilia, found a set of six of the donkeys a few years ago and now bestows them as medals of honor on Democrats whom he considers courageous. One went to J. B. Pritzker, the governor of Illinois, and another to L. Louise Lucas, the president pro tempore of Virginia’s state Senate, who led redistricting efforts there (and is, as of last week, tangled in a federal probe into a cannabis store she owns). But Scudder wasn’t feeling so cavalier in the Texas Panhandle, the rural, northernmost part of the state, which is among the most conservative places in the country. In 2024, Potter County, where he’d been pulled over, cast seventy-two per cent of its ballots for Donald Trump. “Right on, right on,” Haines said, then went back to his patrol car for Scudder’s ticket—a two-hundred-dollar fine, plus a warning. Scudder shifted the Altima into gear. “No way in hell I’m telling him that’s a donkey on my lapel,” he said.

The job of a Texas Democratic chair can seem thankless: the Party hasn’t won a statewide race there in thirty years, the candidates and donors might ignore your advice, and the title is unlikely to impress highway police. Yet Scudder, a progressive thirty-six-year-old real-estate analyst raised by lesbians on a purple-hull-pea farm in East Texas, assumed the post in 2025, and has been in a rush to reverse his party’s pitiful showings. He approaches voters with a genteel politesse, but on the stump he is given to fiery rhetoric about “when this party stood for something” and to thumping the podium. And he has no patience for the Democrats who he believes are responsible for continued losses in the state: Scudder inherited a party that was six hundred thousand dollars in debt and tracked its budget on a dry-erase board at an office in Austin that, he said, “looked like an episode of ‘Hoarders.’ ” He said that some staffers showed up wearing pajama pants. “Oh, it fucking pissed me off,” he told me. Within a year, Scudder had almost completely turned over the staff. “I’m sorry I busted your frat party up,” he said. “But this isn’t a jobs program.”

This cycle, Scudder, with help from the political-action committee Texas Majority, set out to make sure that no race in the state went uncontested, and successfully recruited candidates for each of a hundred and thirty-seven seats. Before he was pulled over, he was trying to get to a meet-and-greet with Diana Loya, a public-school instructional-support coördinator and a state legislative candidate, at a coffee shop in Dumas, Texas. One of the people who trickled in, Joni Denning, explained that she couldn’t talk about being a Democrat at the kennel and veterinary clinic where she works—the television is set to Fox News all day. She hadn’t heard much about James Talarico, the Democratic candidate for Senate, except for attack ads. Denning had come to see if she could meet other people like her. “I don’t really know where they are,” she said.

Democrats around the country dream of a blue wave in Texas, but Party activists and voters describe needing something more akin to an irrigation system. Two-thirds of Democratic precinct chairs were vacant when Scudder became chairman. More than one-fifth of Texas counties have no Democratic Party county chair, a lack that he says makes it harder for candidates to tap into state-Party funds and reach voters. “The Democratic Party has abandoned Texas—or at least this part of Texas,” Aaron Hart, a horse-and-cattle rancher in the Panhandle, told me. “Everybody is pissed off, fed up, and where are you?” The state’s politics now follow a biennial weather pattern: polls show Democrats coming close to victory, and a late surge of Republican voters washes it all away.

“We put out these candidates and we don’t build on the infrastructure that they build,” José Loya, Diana Loya’s husband and the political director for Gina Hinojosa’s gubernatorial campaign, which has surged in recent polling, said. “Their campaigns are done, and then they just go out the wayside, and then they have to start all over.” (A formerly undocumented immigrant from Mexico, Loya once supported Trump, but renounced him after Jim Mattis, who commanded his Marine regiment during the Iraq War, broke with the President.) Tayhlor Coleman, a Democratic content creator who travels the state registering voters and living out of a van, said that she doesn’t tend to rely on local Party officials when organizing trips to rural areas. “Churches are my first call,” she said.

In 2024, as the Democrat Colin Allred challenged Ted Cruz for his Senate seat, Gilberto Hinojosa, who was then the chair of the Texas Democrats (and is Gina’s father), told me that he saw rural counties in Texas as perpetually red. His efforts to set up local Democratic Parties there had been futile, he said. “Those people are never, ever going to change. They’re ninety-per-cent white. They won’t vote for a Democrat,” he added. Coleman, who spends her days trying to give apathetic Texans a reason to register to vote, said that this attitude hurt the Party’s brand. “When you’re able to write off large portions of the population in places that are hard to win, then you don’t have to come up with a campaign message that provides any compromise, to reach across and build coalitions with people who think differently from you,” she said. “And that’s why we’re losing.”

Scudder’s strategy is to cede less territory. “They should have been doing this a decade ago,” he said. Besides recruiting new candidates, he’s opened a regional office in Amarillo, a place that he says Democrats have treated like “no man’s land,” despite the fact the city has a population of two hundred thousand. (A nearby nuclear-weapons-assembly plant employs more people than the school district does teachers.) Bernie Sanders drew a crowd of roughly four hundred there in mid-October; Talarico has also held events in Amarillo twice, and his campaign pointed to polling that showed him ahead of Allred’s 2024 performance there. Gina Hinojosa, who has filmed campaign videos in Amarillo, has leaned into the issue of data centers when talking to rural Texans, holding them up as signs of Republican corruption and corporate plunder, and down-ballot candidates have adopted similar talking points.

Scudder believes that when the Electoral College reapportions its votes after the next census, in 2030, Democrats will depend on Texas to elect a President. “The Party does not have a way to survive if you don’t become competitive in Texas,” he said on the road one night. “It’s a very urgent thing.” Scudder can’t control whether the big state campaigns, including Talarico’s, will get sidetracked or entirely derailed. Instead, he’s hoping that the local campaigns can act as land surveyors—that they’ll identify where supporters live and create a record for future elections, so that future candidates don’t have to start from scratch. Perhaps searching for votes in counties where Democrats lose by thirty points sounds desperate. But Democrats in Texas just might be.

In Dumas one Saturday morning, Scudder parked his rental car on a residential street, right behind a massive Ford pickup. Diana Loya emerged from it, wearing heels and holding a stack of campaign literature. Last election, she voted for Trump—“If you love God and love your country, you must be Republican,” she recalls thinking—but her views changed as a result of the President’s campaign to deport undocumented immigrants. “I honestly see this as kind of like trick-or-treating,” she said, before ringing the doorbell of a red brick home. When a woman opened the front door, the candidate introduced herself without saying that she was a Democrat. Loya asked the woman what she thought were the biggest issues her community was facing—“Data centers?” she offered.

The woman laughed. “Girl, I’m all for data centers,” she said, before shutting the door.

Loya and Scudder cut across the lawn to the next house. “I’ve never heard that before,” Scudder said.

The Texas Panhandle was once overwhelmingly represented in Congress by Democrats. “ ‘You don’t have enough money to be a Republican,’ ” Dustin Sanders, a rancher running for Armstrong County commissioner, remembers his grandfather telling him when he was growing up. By the nineteen-nineties, Karl Rove, the architect of many of George W. Bush’s political triumphs, had identified it as a culturally conservative place that could flip for the G.O.P. In 1992, Potter County split the ticket, electing George H. W. Bush to the White House and Bill Sarpalius, a Democrat, to the House of Representatives. By the next election, in 1994, George W. Bush had visited each of Texas’s two hundred and fifty-four counties in his campaign for governor; Potter County awarded that office, the Senate seat, and the House seat to the Republicans. “What Bush contributed was the solidification of rural Texas,” Rove told me.

That year marked the last cycle a Democrat would be elected to statewide office. “We as a party grew because we were open and inclusive,” Rove said. “We took longtime Democrats who felt they were conservative and that their party had left them, and we took Tejanos, and Asian Americans.” He added, “Republicans are in danger if they forget that.” (Lately, Rove has become the target of the President’s online barbs, after saying that he’d be voting for the Democratic railroad-commissioner candidate because of bigoted remarks the Republican hopeful made online. When I asked Rove if he was supporting Ken Paxton, the state’s attorney general and G.O.P. candidate for the Senate, he said, “Well, I’m going to avoid that question.”)

As Republicans consolidated wide victory margins and Bush ascended to the White House, Democrats retreated in Texas; this, in turn, made it seem impossible for them to win rural counties. Sonya Letson, a former county attorney who began chairing the Armstrong County Democratic Party last year, said that Republicans outworked her party. “The Party began to concentrate on the urban areas where they had more voters that were essentially easier to get to, and so the rural areas began to be organized by the Republican Party fairly heavily,” she told me. The previous Armstrong County Party chair died in 1994, and the position sat empty for decades because no one was willing to step up.

The current enthusiasm for Talarico and Hinojosa in Texas seems to have been built on the unresolved frenzy of other lightning-rod Democratic campaigns in the past decade or so: Wendy Davis’s campaign for governor, in 2014; Beto O’Rourke’s bid for Senate, in 2018, and governor, in 2022; and, Allred’s campaign for Senate two years ago. After those losses, the state experienced a drop in fund-raising and an exodus of campaign talent. Luke Warford, a former Texas Democratic Party staffer who founded the Agave Democratic Infrastructure Fund, is trying to attack the problem outside of the formal Party apparatus, launching a six-million-dollar effort this cycle which includes recruiting candidates and training (and retaining) campaign staff. “If you were running a door-to-door sales company and you were not making any sales, you wouldn’t just knock on more doors,” he says. “You’d be, like, ‘Oh, do we have a product problem?’ ” The rural appeals that Scudder is making, Warford said, have the potential to move “tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of votes.” Yet Paxton and Governor Greg Abbott are still favored to win there. “The Panhandle votes Republican because the people there produce what this country runs on: oil and gas, cattle, and crops,” Madison Cercy, Paxton’s spokesperson, told me in a statement. “Democrats haven’t lost rural Texas because they didn’t visit enough. They’ve lost it because of what they believe.”

In a sense, Scudder agrees that Democrats’ message could use some quality control. “Any time that the Party moves away from economics, they’re losing the plot,” he told me. “Who cares if Trump’s name’s on the Kennedy Center?” He sees the work of a professional Texas Democrat as a balancing act: don’t be so strident that you turn off persuadable moderates, but prove to apathetic voters that you’re willing to throw down for them. “When you have 1.1 million people who voted in 2020 and stayed home in ’24, they’re telling you you aren’t worth voting for,” Scudder said. The Democrats are trying a new message: casting themselves as co-conspirators in a fight to protect a certain way of life.

On September 12th, about two hundred Democrats filtered into the Amarillo Civic Center for a fund-raising dinner put on by local Party chairs. A promotional flyer advertised it as “a nod to the 90’s,” and guests could pay forty dollars for bottle pulls. A live miniature donkey named Stu was available for petting, though he soon had to leave to attend a wedding.

During the opening remarks, an m.c. announced a special video appearance by Talarico. “Hey, Texas Democrats!” Talarico said. “Thank you all for being here today and for showing up for your county convention.” Some in the room thought the video message, which made no specific mention of the Amarillo Democrats, was recycled from earlier this year. “The disrespect,” Scudder said. He scanned the room of eager Democrats eating pasta and salad off paper plates. “These people are working their asses off for you, and you can’t make a fucking video?” he said, before attempting to take that remark off the record. (After I reached out to Talarico’s campaign for comment, Scudder called me to say that a county chair had mistakenly saved two videos with the same name.)

A few tables away, Dustin Sanders, the rancher running for Armstrong County commissioner, sat with Aaron Hart, his husband. Sanders, who is the first Democrat to run for the seat in decades, has gained traction in part because of his viral social-media posts criticizing data centers. Earlier this summer, he had sat on the front porch of his family ranch in Claude, Texas, where he raises show lambs, and posted a photo of a cluster of bright lights in the distance. “Just sitting on the porch after a 105 degree day with no power or water because the grid is overloaded,” he wrote. “We are all ok though as we sit here and look at this beautiful data mine lit up 3 miles from home. . . . Texas can do better!! Deregulation sucks!!!” “Just bitchin’, is all I was doing,” he recalled. But since then his campaign has been buoyed by anger from residents over a six-building data center that Google is putting up near his home. He started adding hashtags such as #saveourwater and #saveourranchers to his missives; soon, they were being shared thousands of times.

“He’s an influencer now,” Hart said, facetiously.

“I know!” Sanders said. “And I don’t even have to take pictures of my feet, which is amazing.”

Onstage, Sanders, who needs only about a hundred and thirty votes to win, said the data center had changed the county “overnight.” “When people went to ask the commissioners and the judge about what is happening with this project, and how it is going to affect the county, they were met with what I would consider ‘Daddy answers,’ ” Sanders told the crowd. “ ‘Don’t worry, Daddy knows what’s best. Don’t worry, we’ve got it under control.’ To me, that is not how local government works.” (Google declined to comment; in an e-mail, a spokesperson for Crusoe, the company building the data center, wrote that it “followed all regulatory processes” and that nearby wind farms help power the complex.) Sanders later clarified that he wasn’t against data centers, just the way the county handled it—plus, he joked, if Google came asking, he’d sell the ranch for the right price.

After dinner, Sanders and Hart took me to a speakeasy in the basement of a hotel on Amarillo’s main drag. The two ranchers met online, a few years ago, when Sanders was a Republican county commissioner. (He was really a Democrat, he said, but he would have had to organize his own Democratic ticket, since there was no local Party, and no one would want to vote for a Democrat anyway.) Sanders later divorced his wife, came out, and married Hart, a former Trump supporter who has since changed his mind over rising fuel costs. Living in a county where Trump won ninety-two per cent of the vote, Hart said, it’s harder to publicly support Democrats than it is to be openly gay. “Being gay is old news now,” he said, in between sips of his beer. “But they think that because we’re Democrats, we support murdering babies and letting boys in girls’ sports, letting a ten-year-old decide to have a sex change. That’s the mentality here.”

Recently, as early voting began, Sanders and others in Texas received mailers purporting to advertise a “Texas Trans & LGBTQ+ Student Resource Guide,” a move that some Democrats believe is designed to gin up conservative fervor. “Now the MAGAs think I’m trying to push an agenda and are running me off their porches,” Sanders said. ◆